1. Field
The present application relates generally to the operation of communication systems, and more particularly, to methods and apparatus for efficient data distribution to a group of users.
2. Background
Data networks, such as wireless communication networks, have to trade off between services customized for a single terminal and services provided to a large number of terminals. For example, the distribution of multimedia content to a large number of devices (users) is a complicated problem. Therefore, it is very important for network administrators, content retailers, and service providers to have a way to distribute content and/or other network services in a fast and efficient manner and in such a way so as to increase bandwidth utilization, to improve power efficiency, and to reduce costs.
In current content delivery/media distribution systems, requests for real time and non real time content and services are received from one or more devices on a network. Servers on the network process each request and provide the requested content in a response to each device. Unfortunately, this technique for serving content may be bandwidth inefficient and expensive since many devices may be requesting the same content. For example, if many devices on a wireless network request the same content from a network server, the content would be re-transmitted many times over expensive air-link resources to satisfy those requests. Such re-transmissions are inefficient and waste expensive network bandwidth.
Therefore is would be desirable to have a system that operates to efficiently distribute data on a network in a way that avoids wasteful re-transmissions of the same data to many requesting devices.